Great news for all Joomla developers!

After developing a few custom components for our clients, we realized just how long and time-consuming it can be, just to create all the files necessary to make a new Joomla 1.5 component, following the MVC standards. Immediately, we realized that a lot of this process was very tedious and repetitive and could be automated if only somebody created some software that did this for the developer… and so we did!

We have created the Joomla Component Creator - which has already saved us hours of development time -  and decided to share it with you all.

The Joomla Component Creator creates all the files necessary; views, helpers, controller, etc. as well as creating all the necessary, appropriately named classes and also version, author and licensing information in the header comment of all the files.

We have already had lots of people trying this tool out for themselves and already a good amount of positive feedback. We hope you like it and it saves as much time for you as it has done for us! If you like it, we would appreciate your reviews.

Just another quick little note to let readers know that we have just finished a Joomla component that can successfully download and maintain an updated local database version of the brilliant location data found at http://www.geonames.org it is not stable enough for us to release it but we can use it as a foundation for building similar applications. So don’t hesitate to contact us if you need to implement Geonames data on your own web site. Especially if it is a Joomla web site.

Creating the import was quite complicated as all the geonames files are zipped CSV files so we needed to program an application that could doanload, unzip and try to convert the data into database inserts. After much swearing and long evenings we have managed to come up with a very robust solution.

Just a quick post to let the world know that we have experience developing and applying the booking.com xml interface into a Joomla component that downloads and updates a local database of all the hotels.

It is quite a task as booking.com only allows you to download 1000 records at a time from up to 15 different feeds per hotel (There are more than 50.000 hotels).

Please contact us if you need a similar solution. We have the experience!

We recently developed a site where we are using the excellent Joomla component Mosets Tree (version 2.0.2). To generate SEF URLs for the site, we are using the sh404SEF component as JoomSEF doesn’t play as nice out of the box.

However, when using sh404SEF there are a couple of issues, most noticeably the fact that status alerts (such as the “Listing submitted successfully! or “Your review is pending approval.” messages that appear when the user submits/rates/reviews/etc. something in the directory) do not appear. This is obviously bad for the user as they don’t get any feedback on whatever action they have just performed.

Luckily, there is a way to fix this that’s not too complicated …

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